Roadmap

[johnyesberg]

Hi Bernie, Thanks for your valuable work on sim.js I notice that @nkofl has made a few neat looking updates in a fork. I wonder whether you'd seen those, and whether you had any plans to continue nurturing sim.js. Would you welcome pull requests, or perhaps you're doing other things and would find them tedious? I'd like to start using it in a new project, and need to decide whether to npm install simjs, or to build from nkofl's repo. Thanks and best wishes, John

[nkofl]

Hi guys, I second John's comment - thanks for all the great work on this. It's been incredibly useful.

Since John mentioned using my fork, I figured I'd chime in with what I did and why. I can wrap this stuff into a PR if you'd like. I didn't before because I had the impression that you, like me, forked it and edited it for a project need rather than out of a burning desire for long-term maintenance / ownership.

• The first was just a bugfix, where I found I was losing objects when I had get...() requests that had multiple resolutions, like a .done and a .unlessEvent.
• Next, I am using this in Node on the server side, so I added the -s option so it would wrap sim.js in a module. This way I can require() it - but I am not totally certain if this would break any other use cases.
• The pause/resume functions were specifically implemented to allow for mid-simulation async operations, such as fetching another batch of data from a database, to be performed. My use cases tend to be pretty long simulations with tens of thousands of entities and millions of events, so data management made this a necessity. For a coffeescript example, within an entity:

  this.sim.pause()
  workBatch = (await WorkQueue.getDatastore().sendNativeQuery(q)).rows
  this.workQueue = this.workBatch.reduce (acc, item) ->
    //do some stuff
  , {}
  this.sim.resume()

• And finally, the entity dictionary was just a way for me to simplify postmortem analysis. I can return the sim object from a function that sets up and runs the simulation, and then pluck entities out of it by name, rather than having to retain references to thousands of entities individually or return them as a separate object. I enforce unique names too, which has often been a bug-catcher for copy/paste errors.

-Nate